How To Create Your Own Online Audience As A Freelance Journalist

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The organization recently published an article saying journalists can hardly get by without a Facebook presence. Referring to excellent examples of Facebook-facilitated online audience bonding by ABC reporters covering the US elections, Poynter made a strong case.

ABC has its reporters well set up with a corporate-looking Facebook account and if you are interested in opening up shop it´s a good idea to take a look at how the reporters deal with the practical issues involved.

For freelance journalists who are on their own, online audience building is a different game. To assume that you can find a representative audience by parking your ass out on a network, no matter how extensive that network, it will instinctively have a foamy feel to it. Like it’s not the way for a true journalist to act, because networks represent only portions of a much bigger world.

Nevertheless, a journalist can not afford to ignore the networks, because of the very same logic; entire portions of life spans have literally moved online. That should not be ignored if you adhere to comprehensive principles in your journalistic approach.

So what is the best way to incorporate the online world into journalistic coverage? How do you build a social network that is both comprehensive, efficient and in any way responsibly representative, without spending too much time on it? And how do you invent a presence that audiences will recognise as a journalistic entity?

ABC´s example answers some of these questions perfectly. The reporter profiles, which are clearly company owned, allow the reporters to make differences between friends and followers. Their followers are their audiences, sources and professional contacts. As a follower, you have the same rights as a friend, but it´s definitely a journalist-source relationship. This sets a professional tone and gives an audience member the idea that their words might be carried further than the usual comment box.

Freelancers can’t easily get sponsored pages like this and will have to create on self-created Facebook groups to find audiences. They will need to figure out a way to maintain a healthy, unbiased balance while running a one (wo)man show.

The ethical issues are considerable too. For instance, where does the freelancer’s role in administering to his audiences stop? Writing salient headlines to get stories accepted by paying editors is not immoral, given that editors are trained professionals and won’t let total bullshit pass by. But what if I played a few tricks on audiences, just to get my stuff read better? Other than putting my reputation at risk, what damage would I be able to do before being caught out?

The one-man-show reporter is not only a writing machine, he’s also economically dependent on publishing and distributing the information. Hopefully, some of these issues will get addressed by people that track these issues. NewAssignment´s latest project beatblogging.org is one to watch in the next twelve months. Its editors recently announced a project that deals with the way real life reporters will create and engage with their own, online audiences. The project, aims to provide eager onlookers with details of strategies devised by participating professional and amateur journalists. Jay Rosen and David Cohn are going to keep us up to date with how 13 beat reporters working for a mixture of established and amateur media will meaningfully or less meaningfully interact with their personal audiences.

One of the first issues anyone wishing to build an online audience needs to consider is just how much effort to dedicate to the activity. When two Poynter journalists started their own group on Facebook a few months ago, one of their participants drew attention to this by semi-seriously addressing the audience. "Hello, message board full of grieving teens”, he said. “My name is so and so, from news organization X. Would any of you here like to share any poorly punctuated memories of that poor kid who drowned/got shot/died suddenly during a sporting event? MSG me!"

The writer had a point; an unwritten rule of journalism is that your stories are only as credible as your sources. However, the online world is more diverse than he makes it out to be; even Facebook is more diverse than a bunch of teens. If you are quite sure that your target audience contains the people who possess the knowledge that your beat comprises, then there’s definitely a purpose to addressing them. Almost of more importance at the outset, will be considering what’s involved in actually reaching the audience.

The sheer practicalities will feel almost as important as your motivating factor. But it´s no waste of time to play around with a few networks before deciding on how to proceed. If you know the ropes at Facebook, you can assess other networks for their value too.

Facebook and most other networks are heavily populated by topic focused groups, so you’ll be able to find great sources. It is easy to target groups and invite hordes of people with a simple message, informing them of the terms of participation. Once you’ve dedicated enough time to researching your basic audience, you can just build along, by extending the network as you cover more stories.

To preserve your role as an intermediary between editors and audiences, you’d have to create a separate editors/client group. But only do this when you’ve figured out a meaningful way of engaging these editors; e.g. by showcasing your project as an interesting journalistic experiment. Because why else would they visit? Unless you’re a demi god in journalism, no editor is interested in you, unless you excelled in super targeting editors.

Other than Facebook, check out the dozens of smaller social networks that often operate on more straightforward principles. This article on Techcrunch, entitled Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network describes strong and weak points of nine such social networks, singling out a platform called Ning as a topper. I searched for freelance journalist networks on Ning and realised that many journalists are using this tool to reach out. Building a group of similar professionals could help strengthen the concept of the freelance journalist shop. One great feature of Ning is that it allows you to run a forum. Facebook does too, of course. A forum is great for audience building.

If you have the patience, hold out for the launch of Publish2.com. They’re a bunch of people wanting to launch a social network dedicated solely to journalists. They’ve said they will work by invitation only, so you’re not 100% sure you’re not waiting in vain. Also, the site might not be too hot on audiences, because its focus is a network for journalists and paper editors.

The social networks simply need testing. I think that it’s quite important that if you choose to build a social network, you’ll need tick off your own points. You want to regulate the process through forum like moderation and ideally invite members to join the discussion through the click of a button. However, if you’ve got it all set up too well, you might do yourself short because participants won’t be spontaneous anymore. However, these are points that likely are remedied relatively easily.

Disclosure: Angelique van Engelen (alias Clixy123) is a freelance journalist who is involved in www.reporTwitters.com, a platform for journalists using Twitter.